We all talked about that. It was garbage?! Here's what I had to say at the time (boldface added):

Yes, we have to stop first and wonder how good are the Daily Kos/Research 2000 pollsters. I picked up this story at Talking Points Memo, where there's no information about why I should trust this poll. How did they locate their 2,000 "self-identified" Republicans, who, TPM tells us represent "the psyche of the minority party's base"?...

Here's the Kos post announcing the results of the poll. It begins with this mind-boggling sentence:

"As I've mentioned before, I'm putting the finishing touches on my new book, American Taliban, which catalogues the ways in which modern-day conservatives share the same agenda as radical Jihadists in the Islamic world." It turns out this poll was designed to help him with that theory.

How independent and reliable is Research 2000?

Now, Kos is distancing himself from Research 2000. But I want to know the whole story. What's going on with that book of his?

I don't know about a book I would never have read, but I can say this.

I like the way Kos has handled this. He got out in front of it, he took the blame for his part (which was being the victim here), and he didn't doc dump it on a Friday (this upcoming one would have been perfect).

Wading into the DKos comments section (you're welcome fuckers) they're all patting Kos on the back for his integrity with R2K. Yup, Mister Integrity alright. A real fucking truth, justice and intellectual honesty type of guy right here:

"But I found myself making certain claims about Republicans that I didn't know if they could be backed up. So I thought, "why don't we ask them directly?" And so, this massive poll, by non-partisan independent pollster Research 2000 of over 2,000 self-identified Republicans, was born."

If you actually read his sentences carefully, including his syntactical abominations, it is apparent that he is a hopelessly ignorant and remote individual who understands very little about politics or political theory.

Everyone could tell there was something very wrong with that poll. But the company took his money and sold the poor fool a lot of the nonsense that he wanted to hear.

Now he has a book that has probably gone to the printer, which he has a contract to have done in a certain way, which he has publicized and promoted--and which is based on laughably and now visibly false materials.

It is really a perfect comeuppance for a self-righteous, self-important, and priggish fool.

"Book was stripped of references to R2K, except in two instances where I couldn't do so without affecting page count (too late for me to do that since the index was done), but those two examples also references other supporting polling, so my premise didn't depend on the R2K results."

Kos is a huge brighter-than-thou asshole. Yet he fell for data validating his own completely wrong beliefs.

He's an idiot. I don't feel sorry for him. I don't think he did good here. Doing the right thing after you did the wrong thing doesn't change the fact that you did the wrong thing. And he's still as stupid as he was when believed the ridiculous data.

How much credit to give to Kos for coming clean? I want to know if he's trying to get out in front of something that's about to hit. He's shifting the blame. But he is responsible for the shit he purveyed. I thought it smelled like rot when it was first announced.

OK, so do not give him credit for it if you think he was just getting out ahead of it.

Give him credit for handling it better than 90% of those who have a reason to hide something.

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt here. It sounds to me like he didn't buy their crap after the Lincoln-whathisname primary, and when given evidence to support what his thoughts were, he did the right thing.

Publishing his book regardless is a bit weak, but did anyone here really think he tailored his book to the evidence, or rather was just going to include evidence that supported what he thinks? The 'good on him' is for not accepting faked evidence.

Moulitsas writes: "Book was stripped of references to R2K, except in two instances where I couldn't do so without affecting page count (too late for me to do that since the index was done), but those two examples also references other supporting polling, so my premise didn't depend on the R2K results."

But this is clearly just a pathetic attempt to salvage his book, which is now totally discredited.

Doesn't he realize that he has based his arguments around beliefs about Republicans that he now knows to be untrue?

It is not enough to take out "references" to R2K.

He has to take out the arguments of the book itself--and then there is nothing left.

He has put his name on a book that is now discredited. He has made himself a laughingstock.

That is why his Journolist friends and supporters want to spin how noble he is--because it is clear that he has actually just made hiself the object of public ridicule.

"As I've mentioned before, I'm putting the finishing touches on my new book, American Taliban, which catalogues the ways in which modern-day conservatives share the same agenda as radical Jihadists in the Islamic world." -by kos Tue Feb 02, 2010 at 08:58:03 AM PDT

"Every death should be on the front page Let the people see what war is like. This isn't an Xbox game. There are real repercussions to Bush's folly.That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren't in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them."

EC - They're both trying to salvage the unsalvageable. DKos just hit first. It's about the only thing he's gotten right here - control the flow of information, don't react.

It looks like he contracted R2K to give him the data he wanted, then bounced the check. R2K fudged the numbers and/or methodology and Kos was fine with it, or even requested it. I wouldn't bet against R2K having some damning evidence to support that.

It's to the lawyers now, so everyone is gonna clam up until everyone settles up out of court so everyone will shut up about the whole affair. R2K goes belly up, Kos sells enough of his book to pay off the crap advance he got from his crap publisher.

This is nothing more than the vindication that Kos is a mentally disturbed leftard that vehemently hates conservatives and conservative ideas and principals and he is and was willing to further embrace his nonsensical ignorant fantasy via this fakery. He commissioned it. He paid for it. He got what he wanted and based on those numbers he framed his idiocy around them. Now, he's suing the company for fabrication of product, in essence. He's a discredit to society. He's entitled to his beliefs, even if they are nothing buy fringe leftard kook nonsense, but he isn't entitled to his own facts. Stunner.

The writing of such a ridiculously-titled book with such a ridiculous premise reminds me of what Julian Assange of Wikileaks said in this recent interview.

He was talking about his initial experience trying to provide fresh source material to bloggers:

"Our initial idea was... surely those people [the bloggers] would step forward, given fresh source material, and do something. No! It's all bullshit. It's all bullshit. In fact, people write about things... because they want to display their values to their peers who are already in the same group. Actually they don't give a fuck about the material, that's the reality."

This is what seems to have happened with Kos; he has drifted more and more into his value-based world, and in the process has become more and more disconnected with reality.

It seems that Kos and his followers were much more concerned about the veracity of their ideas when their Democrats in the opposition. Facts will help you get people in the group; but once you've gained control, attracting new people is no longer imperative and the value-brandishing takes over.

Kos's book immediately brings to mind Jonah Goldberg's, which was just as off-putting.

Shorter Kos: we paid people to tell us what we wanted to hear, what we were already sure of, even though any reasonable person could have told us were full of shit. And then they told us what we wanted to hear, and were sure of. Turns out, those people couldn't tell us what were sure of and wanted to hear because we were totally full of shit. We're going to sue!

Your charge is not specific enough to warrant a response. He has posted an argument. You could try to prove a rational ability and lay out an argument.

But you can't, mainly because he is right. The right wing has many similarities to the Taliban.

That's why hysterical assertions by the wingers that liberals hate America and want the terrorists to win are so absurd. As absurd as it would've been to claim that Reagan wanted the Communists to win the Cold War. The Taliban/Al Qaida/Hezbollah/Jihadists of the world are the exact embodiment of evil in the liberal mind. They are everything we are against, and against everything we are for.

In fact, they are exactly what we see in the Republican Party as the GOP continues to consolidate power -- creeping theocracy, moralizing, us versus them, embrace of torture, the need to constantly declare jihad on someone, hysterics over football-game nipples, control over "decency" on the airwaves, lyrics censorship, hostility to women freedoms, curtaling of civil liberties, and so on.

Except that when he tried to demonstrate his wacky and false beliefs, he had to end up suing his own polling company because the polling company was forced to resort to fabrication to validate his wacky and false beliefs.

Let's see if I've kept proper score: Places the GOP hates: San Francisco, Berkeley, Hollywood, Massachusetts, Vermont, big cities, New York City, Chicago, The North, Mexico, France, Europe, national parks, and pretty much the entire rest of the World.

Alpha -- I suppose it is true that the goofy statement that you posted was another in a long line of truly dumb utterances at, by, or sanctioned by Kos. In the future, please shorten your posts by simply saying: Kos has written something.

But this is clearly just a pathetic attempt to salvage his book, which is now totally discredited.

"Discredited" is a subjective judgement. Do you think AL feels the book is discredited by its tainted source material, or by the fact that its author evidently (wittingly or unwittingly) paid for the conclusions he wanted? Not at all.

Will Kos himself withdraw the book, seeing that the factual assertions it rests on were faked? Really?

Do you think book reviewers and mainstream journalists will refrain from discussing and pushing this book and its thesis because you or I think it rests on shaky (or nonexistent) foundations? Ha.

To those few of us paying close attention to these matters, the book is not credible. Most people don't pay close attention, and they pick up impressions and general feelings from their media exposure. A year from now, if you stop people on the street, 90% won't have heard of the book, but 99% of the remainder will say, "Oh, yes, I heard about it, it was some scholarly study about how dangerous the Republican 'base' is." 0.1% will know that the polling was faked; none of the rest will ever have heard that, except as a one-sentence to the effect that, "Although conservatives claimed that...".

Keep in mind, if you can, he published these polls for that book weekly.

Kind of like giving away the book and then trying to sell it.

I eagerly await your response.

What's to respond too? Your a known liar. Everything you say here is completely suspect, is without merit, and dubious at best. You haven't a shred of decency in that deranged leftard mind of yours and you further stain what pitiable dignity you have left by coming to the defense of another known liar like Kos. Seriously, do you yourself a favor and find other places to peddle your lies and untruths. Someplace where you can garner an audience of other miscreant political flakes and hacks who fancy themselves gotch-sters at the smallest stench of what they perceive to be irony and hypocrisy.

Fact of the matter is, is that you aren't even a good leftard. You can't even think for yourself. You basically are nothing but a DNC/SWP rss talking point. A pathetic maggot on the shit end of politics and life. Even HDHouses lies don't come anywhere close to yours.

This is priceless. It's like when the local moonbats serve up a Media Matters economic "study" proving how great Obamanomics are working. Everyone who looks at the numbers knows that they are false, and it becomes a guessing game as to where the deception ends and the gullibility begins. In this case, it looks like Kos happily gobbled obviously false data in order to push his views. I suppose he and his regular readers could have actually believed all the farcical poll numbers the site used to post, but I doubt it.

she still has the pants, apparently. And claims some kind of video evidence.

Also Daily Kos is being sued right back. http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2010/06/markos-bets-ranch.html

Legal insurrection correctly notes that if Daily Kos had simply filed suit and didn't comment on the case, letting the legal filings speak for themselves, he would have been protected from the obvious claims regarding defamation.

Btw, Ann, i still say you should sue to discover those archives from journolist. now you can even get $100,000 for your trouble.

The polls were obviously fake, as many on this site pointed out at the time, but it's interesting to see Kos admitting it. The thing is, if they hadn't been so biased in the first place they would have realized the data was faked just by the results.

The three authors who Kos called “statistic wizards” Mark Grebner, Michael Weissman, and Jonathan Weissman. They are respectively described in the Kos post as political consultant, a retired physicist, and a wildlife research technician. These are his 3 expert witnesses proving that Research 2000 is full of crap.

The problem with the whole "conservatives have the same objectives as the Taliban" theme is that it isn't remotely true. I guess though to Alpha that is merely a small obstacle that good writing can overcome, even when the polling data is bogus.

On the plus side, branding conservatives as the "American Taliban" serves to put conservatives on the defensive, but it has the following problems you need to address (I read the link Alpha provided to the 2005 article, so it's a bit old, but..). I'll go ahead in the spirit of charity and point them out, Alpha, and you can start working on them:

(1) Conservatives have yet to come out for putting women in burqas, taking away their driving licenses, and forcing them to only go out in public escorted by a related man, and required to walk behind him. I don't see anyone from church like this either. I've never had a Sunday school lesson saying this is the way we should be. So all the Baptist churches I've gone to are actually quite liberal? I don't see how church-going people who vote Democrat are going to be persuaded that the conservatives they bump elbows with at church are like Kos describes.

(2) Maybe Kos has a more modern definition of the American Taliban now, since the article you linked is from 2005? I'm trying to figure out how Sarah Palin figures into the agenda of conservatives to go hysterical over nipples and curtail women's freedoms so they can't run for high office, say. Or how Republicans are so hopelessly hijacked by religious conservatives, yet Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman are running for higher office.

(3) Y'all need to be more careful about how you define conservatives, because in that 2005 article Kos gave the game away: He cites in the 1st paragraph the "useful smear" by the Right of calling the American left communists. It's clear then this whole "American Taliban" thing is a tit-for-tat smear. He just cited a Big Lie as the means to do his own Big Lie.

(4) Kos does use black-and-white language to define the jihadists as "anti-liberal" and "everything we're against" so at least he clearly shows he's not sympathetic and wants them defeated. However, he also just blasted Republicans use of "us vs. them" and "moralizing," and being like jihadis in having a "black-and-white sense of truth." It confuses the message to say you hate the Republicans because their methods are so atrocious, and then use the same methods to demonize them and define yourself.

We have the benefit of hindsight now, since Republicans are the minority party. Got anything more recent?

A liberal's day lately seems to consist of: waking up, seeing that another hero has fallen to the truth, going on blogs and denying the truth, then saying the truth doesn't matter, then saying other people do it too, then some tofu, and back to bed. Next day, next hero.

It must be like living in a sweat lodge, watching your fellows fall over dead, but being too much a follower to go out into the fresh air.

These are his 3 expert witnesses proving that Research 2000 is full of crap.

It was a straightforward application of Benford's Law. Most people think they know what "random" means, but they are wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law

I hadn't heard of this law. If I'd been faking data, I'd have been caught too, because I don't understand "random" numbers as well as I think I do.

Now that I know about this, I could use to catch people, and so could you, provided you used it properly. You don't need a Ph. D. in statistics to do it, it's too simple. Forensic accountants use it. Anyone who knew a lot about statistics would know about it, whether or not they were a professional statistician.

The lies "based" on these polls have been dispersed widely by Kos. Damage has already been done. Many will continue to hold on to beliefs based on or supported by those polls. Kos will never be able to fully undo the damage done by the lies he willfully spread.

More than what he's done to admit his mistake, he needs to write numerous posts showing the specific results that are wrong and unfair to the groups falsely portrayed.

From what I read elsewhere, Research 2000's creation of the false results was incredibly amateurish for supposed professinals.

"Kos will never be able to fully undo the damage done by the lies he willfully spread."

You think he wants to undo the damage? Of course you don't.

I don't think there's much damage. People who aren't drinking the kool-aid already know what Kos is and put no credence in him anyways. The Kool-aid drinkers will will fall back on the "truthiness" meme. Nothing has changed.

There is plenty. I hear people spout those poll results who have no idea who Kos is. For people who don't have much exposure to Tea Party types (liberals) this slander is already accepted as fact. Since it feeds their need for superiority, it will not be given up just because it's discredited. See global warming, socialism or nearly any other discredited liberal idea. They never die, just take short rests. That's what makes progressives dinosaurs

Reminds me of a joke in church when the Sunday School teacher cites a news article statistic. The retort:

"But studies show that 83% of all statistics are wrong."

You have to be careful when citing polls that prove the truth of your beliefs, let alone the shoddiness that went into R2K's. Even when the polling is legit, you can still get results that you interpret to fit your original conclusion. And leave out other interpretations, or crop it so that you don't deal with what it means in a larger picture. In the end, a poll is a snapshot: information can change, or be shaped, which is why they are used for political strategy, but using them to define political opponents only works if:

(1) You understand their underlying rationale, and are using this information to actively change their minds.

(2) Trying to score cheap points with your own side by demonizing the other side, or thinking you can convince somebody on the fence who is simply not rooted one way or the other.

Number 1 is harder but legit. Number 2 can work in the short run but can also undermine you. It makes you look mean-spirited if you cite a poll as proof the other side is so clueless, mean, tribal, or otherwise out of touch with the normal people like us, and then your echo chamber simply devolves into nasty comments going back and forth. It's not a left/right thing, it works both ways. I don't know who it convinces to switch teams.

A) The results he found regarding the bizarre extremism of modern con's have been replicated in numerous other polls.

B) R2K was only one of several polling firms to find bizarre extremism among modern con's.

C) "Conservatives can hope that all these polling outfits are found out to be frauds as well, or just accept that their base is buying the crap they're selling. If they want to scream about Obama being illegitimate, then maybe people will believe that Obama is illegitimate.

I have to take someone with a grain of salt when they talk about widespread "bizarre extremism" in reference to conservatives, but don't bat an eye at things like the violent leftist protests at summits like the recent G20 or the Lewis Farrakhan of the world.

A) The results he found regarding the bizarre extremism of modern con's have been replicated in numerous other polls.

Fake, but accurate!

(And with Kos making public statements that R2K's results "have been replicated in numerous other polls" to try to salvage his credibility and his book, R2K is going to eat Kos's lunch with their countersuit.)